[fxtentacle]

Of course not.

For the same reason why companies pay $2000 per day for an experienced consultant when an employee could theoretically build the same stuff at minimum wage. Sometimes, mistakes are expensive. And then you need people who can reason about why they are doing what they are doing. AI can maybe churn out CRUD better than other generators, but when you have any significant amount of money depending on the software working, nobody is going to use ChatGPT without a human code review.

But ChatGPT code is typically overly lengthy and complicated, just like what a beginner would produce. And that makes for expensive and slow code reviews. That's why in the end it's cheaper overall to skip all that and just hire a professional.

[anthropodie]

It's excellent for menial programming tasks like fill up database with dummy data or generating boilerplate code.

[tekknik]

For now, 2-3 years ago it couldn’t even generate code. 2-3 years from now will be very different.

[TheCoelacanth]

Historically, many approaches to AI have shown excellent early results but then plateaued. There's no guarantee that this approach will continue to have major improvements in results.

[tekknik]

There’s also no guarantee it won’t. Not sure how this is supposed to give someone comfort.

[sebzim4500]

The question wasn't just about ChatGPT though. If the SOTA improves as much in the next decade as it has in the last decade (for from a guarantee of course), it will be hard for any tech company to justify having thousands of developers.

[fxtentacle]

Yes.

But in my experience, a small and highly skilled team already outcompetes these armies right now.

Working as an "IT consultant" after a 2 week bootstrap course has always been unsustainable. We will likely get rid of 90% of the current "software engineers" without any meaningful reduction in productivity.